I Was Born to Manipulate
Growing up, my parents were pretty strict. They wanted my siblings and me to exercise independence and to be self-sufficient. If my siblings or I had the gall to complain of boredom, we were abruptly kicked outside to “figure it out.” My most significant entertainment source was my imagination, and my childhood was filled with great adventures and some silly antics as a result.
In the summer of 1992, I was at the ripe age of 6. I had been operating a friendship bracelet business out of our red wagon for a couple of weeks and decided it was time for me to move on. I had learned from this endeavor that I only needed a more extensive consumer base than my three friends who lived on my cul-de-sac.
One day, my far cooler sister had a friend over, and I overheard them talking about the trials and tribulations of their middle school social life. They were talking about how they wanted to be more popular and have more friends. I had just the solution.
I was going to create and sell imaginary friends.
The major selling factor was that I would customize the friends. With every sale, I delivered a drawing of what the invisible friend looked like and a persona to match that listed of their traits, special powers, hobbies, and quirks!
My target demographic was any of my sister’s friends. My pricing strategy was somewhat simplistic, but very much catered to my objective of affording ice-cream from the ice-cream man. At this point in time, the ice-cream man was charging around $.50 for any frozen delight from his truck. The time it took for me to create and design the invisible friends was also factored in. So I thought it was fair that I charged $1 per friend.
That summer, I felt like the coolest kid on the block because I was able able to get ice-cream whenever the ice-cream truck summoned all the children with its hypnotic music. Even my parents were impressed! To think that I was profiting on something that was entirely made up!
So, is manipulation, influencing, persuading, or nudging unethical? The answer is sometimes. It all comes down to the true intent of the marketer.
It was evident in my sales pitch (that featured a cheeseball grin with missing front teeth) that I was genuinely trying to help solve a real problem. My customers purchased their imaginary companions from me, mostly out of curiosity, to see what I could come up with. But in my mind, I was helping increase the number of friends that people had and, therefore, increasing their popularity at school. If I or someone I attempted the same sale at the age of 20, it would be safe to assume that the intent would have been far less innocent, not to mention strange.
